40 Years In The Desert

Meanwhile, In the Persian Gulf

2026-06-11T18:03:00.000-04:00

So, it appears that an Iranian drone took down an Apache helicopter and Trump launched retaliatory attacks on Iran, including strikes on at least two reservoirs, (Yes this is a war crime according to black letter international law) and then Iran responded by striking US bases and US related infrastructure among Gulf nations.

A US Army helicopter gunship was apparently struck by an Iranian Shahed drone before going down near the Strait of Hormuz—but it’s unclear whether the one-way attack drone was deliberately aimed or achieved more of a lucky accidental strike.

Axios correspondent Barak Ravid first reported an unnamed US government official’s comments that an Iranian drone had hit the US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter before the latter went down on June 8. The New York Times later confirmed that reporting through more anonymous US officials, including one official who said US military investigators were still evaluating whether the Iranian drone strike on the helicopter was intentional or accidental.

………

The basic models of Iranian Shahed drones rely on GPS satellite guidance and preprogrammed coordinates to strike stationary targets from long range and are not usually designed to track and strike moving targets, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC, in an interview with The New York Times. But he suggested that Iran may have received newer Russian-modified Shahed drones that can be remotely operated to strike targets in motion.

Whatever the case, the result is that an Iranian drone that usually costs about $35,000 managed to take down a US Army helicopter with a price tag of $25 million. The only silver lining for the US military was its successful rescue of both helicopter crew members from the water due to the unprecedented use of a drone boat.

………

Trump was initially inclined to shrug off the Apache helicopter’s downing after the pilots were rescued, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the president apparently changed his mind during a White House briefing when both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine “recommended military action” and shared more details about the Iranian Shahed drone striking the US helicopter.

The strikes from US fighter jets targeted Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz, according to the US Central Command press release. But Iran’s state broadcaster claimed the US military strikes also damaged water tanks and cut off the water supply for at least 20,000 people in Hormozgan province.

Iran also retaliated by launching yet another round of Iranian missile and drone attacks against Gulf countries such as Bahrain and Kuwait, along with Jordan, according to The New York Times. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an Iranian paramilitary force, said it had targeted US bases in the region, including the US Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain, while claiming to shoot down yet another US MQ-9 Reaper drone.

More on the strikes on the reservoirs: (Also see the mealy mouthed confirmation from what Atrios calls that f%$#ing paper)

The United States and Iran engaged in some of the most intense fighting overnight since all-out hostilities in the ongoing US‑Israeli war on Iran were halted with a Pakistan‑mediated temporary ceasefire on April 8.

A comprehensive peace agreement remains elusive as Iran and the US have exchanged a series of proposals and counterproposals in the weeks since that pause. After a string of smaller escalations, however, the US struck targets in Iran following the downing of a US Apache helicopter close to the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, and Iran retaliated by hitting US military bases in the Gulf.

The US military said it targeted communications and radar facilities. Iranian officials, however, said civilian infrastructure was also damaged, including two water reservoirs.

If correct, this is the first reported strike on civilian infrastructure in Iran in several weeks, but it comes at a time when Iran is facing a severe water shortage.

Yeah, US military has forsworn attacks on civilian infrastructure for a few weeks, what sweethearts.

And Trump provides yet more evidence that he's senile or profoundly stupid:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was "shocked" that Iran attacked neighboring Gulf states in retaliation to U.S. and Israeli strikes, insisting that nobody could have predicted such a response.

"They weren't supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked," Trump said at a White House event.

He doubled down hours later, stating that "the UAE is like the banker for Iran. Qatar, they are neighbors and got along okay. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. No expert would say that's gonna happen. It's not a question of 'gee should you have known' - and if we did, big deal. We have to do what we have to do," he said in the Oval Office.

In reality, many experts have long warned that Iran was willing and prepared to strike these countries. Iran itself further warned explicitly that neighboring states hosting U.S. military bases could be targeted as part of its deterrence strategy.

I wonder how much longer they can to maintain this façade, because world inventories of oil and other distillates have fallen off of a cliff.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open tomorrow, these inventories would take about 6 weeks to see new oil.

I honestly expect to see 1973-style gas lines in the United States.

The Big One

2026-06-10T19:39:00.000-04:00

There are indications that the San Andreas and related faults have unprecedentedly high stress levels, raising concerns that a 7+ earthquake is due sooner and not later in the area.

Having had been in 2 earthquakes, and remembering one (I was less than 2 years old for the first one), I really hope that is not going to be as bad as it looks.

Earthquakes usually occur along fracture zones in Earth's crust, where large tectonic plates slide past one another and become locked. Stress builds up over long periods and is suddenly released in the form of an earthquake. In Southern California, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are among the most significant of these zones, accommodating most of the plate motion in the region.

Where the two fault systems approach each other northeast of Los Angeles lies the Cajon Pass—a tectonically complex junction where a rupture on one fault could potentially cross onto the other. Since the last major earthquake to affect the wider Los Angeles region, the Fort Tejon earthquake of 1857, with a magnitude of 7.9, tectonic stress along the fault segments has built up continuously during a prolonged quiet period that has long concerned researchers, given the potential for a large future rupture.

In a new study led by Dr. Liliane Burkhard of the Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences (WP) at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, an international research team modeled 1,000 years of earthquake history along the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems to estimate the present-day stress loading at Cajon Pass. Researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Science Center in Pasadena, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego were involved.

The results show that tectonic stresses in the region have reached and, in some cases, exceeded the highest levels of the last millennium.

In the study, the researchers also introduced the concept of Cajon Pass as an "earthquake gate," a junction that controls whether large earthquakes remain confined to a single fault or propagate across both systems simultaneously. The study has just been published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

There are indications that stress is high in both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, meaning that there is an elevated chance of both faults rupturing at the same time.

Not good, but still better than Donald Trump.

114%

2026-06-10T19:08:00.000-04:00

That is how overpriced the SpaceX IPO is according to a Morningstar analysis reported by that Commie rag the Financial Times. (They ain't called th, Pink Paper," for nothing.)

My guess is that even an analysis stating that IPO is overvalued by 114% will be shown by reality to be over optimistic.

………
Their headline findings are:

The stock’s probably worth $63 per share, a 53 per cent discount to the $135 issue price.

SpaceX probably has an addressable market of about $129bn, rather than the $1.6tn claimed in its S-1 filing.

In a (metaphorical) moonshot scenario, where SpaceX pioneers orbital data centres and captures 20 per cent of AI computing capacity by 2040, the company would be worth $1.97tn, or $154 per share.

Morningstar assigns only a 7 per cent per cent chance of the moonshot scenario happening.

For Starlink, Morningstar estimates the global market to be worth about $129bn, which is rather less SpaceX’s estimate of $1.6tn. “[T]echnical constraints and unit economics limit the business primarily to lower-density markets,” it says.

Here’s a link to the full note on SpaceX valuation, and here’s its note on Starlink market sizing. Space cadets and attached bankers, do please tell us in the comments what Morningstar gets wrong.

Look out below.

How About That Economy?

2026-06-10T18:34:00.000-04:00

Inflation just spiked to 4.2%.

I think that Trump's new nominee for Fed Chair is going to be forced to raise rates at the next meeting.

Inflation crossed 4 percent for the first time in three years in May, exacerbating Americans’ pain at the pump and dealing a fresh political blow to the White House, as the Iran war’s toll on consumers shows no sign of abating.
The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose at a 4.2 percent annual pace in the year ending in May, up from 3.8 percent in April with higher energy prices again accounting for much of the monthly gain.
Gas prices, which have surged roughly 50 percent since January as the Iran conflict disrupts oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, rose 7 percent in May. The reading marks the third consecutive month in which the conflict has measurably pushed prices higher for American consumers.
………
Trump shrugged off the report hours after its release, delivering a line sure to be featured in Democratic attack ads around the midterm elections this fall: “I love the inflation,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday.

That response from Trump is totally mental.

One does wonder what is going to happen when we finally run to the end of petroleum and natural gas stockpiles.

We may see 1973 style gas lines.

Tech Bros Not Thinking Things Through

2026-06-10T18:04:00.000-04:00

Generally, when a story starts with, "A German court ruled," you should expect bad news.

Not this time.

This time, a court in Munich has ruled that Google can be held liable false AI generated summaries.

Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.

But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.

That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”

Google's AI generated content is Google generated content, just the same as if one of their flesh and blood employees drafted and published this.

The ruling is sound, which makes it an outlier for a German court, and it is just, which also makes it an outlier for a German court.

Part of the allure of AI systems is the belief that they subvert accountability for the company that uses them.

Not so much.

Linkage

2026-06-10T05:56:00.000-04:00

DC Library holds taking forever? You're not alone. (51st News) Baker & Taylor, the largest book distributor to libraries in the United States, has gone bankrupt.
Institutional Rot And The Death Rattle Of America (Off Message) Money quote, "Republican politics has become like Jackass, where degeneracy is a contest, and they applaud one another for new innovations in the field. They revel in vice. They go to the cameras, compete to tell the most outlandish lies, then pat each other on the back like players celebrating in the dugout."
No one wants a permanent gerontocracy (Cory Doctorow) The URL reads, "It's not OK, Boomer." :Public office should not be elder care.
Real-life Snuffleupagus found swimming in the Great Barrier Reef (Popular Science) The similarity is striking.
CEO Receives Violent Threats After Kicking Off AI Layoffs (Futurism) Afflicting the comfortable is a good thing.
Crypto Security Pioneer: 'I Now Consider All of DeFi Unsafe’ (Gizmodo) DeFi = decentralized finance, i.e. crypto and its bastard children. There is a reason that it took over 1,000 years for our financial system to mature. This is not easy stuff.
Inference Is Unlikely to Ever Be a Low Marginal Cost Operational Node (Brad Delong) By, "Inference," Delong means large language model AI.
github and the crime against software (Efron Licht) A good summary of the enshittification of Github as a result of Microsoft's neglect and efforts to add AI to everything.
Elephant declines could trigger wider ecosystem losses in African savannas, 15-year test shows (Phys.org) much like beavers, they are a cornerstone to the ecologies of the areas where they live.
If It Walks Like a Bubble and Quacks Like a Bubble, Then It’s Probably a Bubble (Barron's) On SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I think that they are wrong. This is not a bubble, it is a bezzle, a yet unrecognized fraud.
Free, Easy, Dead: The Difficult Birth And Predictable Death Of IRS Direct File (Defector) A good program that helped people, but the people that it helped did not have lobbyists.

Trump goes to game 3 of the NBA finals, gets booed:

Primaries Tonight

2026-06-09T23:22:00.000-04:00

The quick summary is tonight's results is notwithstanding the best efforts of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and the New York Times, Graham Platner is now the official party nominee, getting more than ¾ of the vote, and soon to be former Congresswoman Nancy Mace came in a very distant 5th place in the South Carolina Republican Gubernatorial primary.

One wonders just how egregiously the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will ignore the whole, "Vote blue no matter who," mantra in Platner's case.

Criminals Gotta Crime

2026-06-09T18:56:00.000-04:00

And by criminals, I mean the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, who just got caught surreptitiously installing facial recognition software on their smart glasses.

Seeing as how they did not announce this to their users, it would have been a selling point, it is not unreasonable to assume that this was for Meta to spy on its users.

Hell, everything in Meta is about spying on its users.

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

Well, this seems completely aboveboard and not suspicious at all.

Adjusting the Facts to Match Their Ideology

2026-06-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

The Trump administration is dismantling a network of ocean sensors that monitor conditions related to anthropogenic climate change, because if they plug their ears and close their eyes, there is no problem.

Attempting to suppress information about an ongoing planet-wide catastrophe will not end well.

The Trump administration is targeting one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data—the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times, ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.

In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a “descoping” process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI’s five deployed arrays. “This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints,” the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.

In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a “nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

The NSF statement is best described as an attempt to get a, "Bullsh%$ bingo," win.

The suppression of this data, which is literally right out of the Project 2025 playbook, will cripple climate science for decades.

It's Official

2026-06-08T22:23:00.000-04:00

Following a flood of mail-in votes favoring Nithya Raman over TV reality star, and complete nut job Spencer Pratt, she has advanced to a runoff against incumbent mayor Karen Bass.

The Republicans, of course, are alleging vote fraud, but there is no evidence of this.

Nithya Raman had 115 days to make her case to Los Angeles voters.
The City Council member made a surprise late entry into the mayor’s race, the last of the major candidates to file for the primary. That left little time for her to form a campaign team, build her name recognition and persuade voters that she would be the best choice to lead the city.
On Monday, the Associated Press called the race, concluding that Raman would have enough votes to make a Nov. 3 runoff against Mayor Karen Bass, the first-place finisher who secured her spot in the showdown last week.
Reality television personality Spencer Pratt, who was in second place on election night, saw his lead over Raman steadily erode as mail-in ballots postmarked as late as June 2 were counted.

On Monday, Raman widened her gap over Pratt to nearly 3 percentage points. Bass had 34.3% of the vote, compared with 28.6% for Raman and 25.8% for Pratt, the latest results showed.

Here's hoping that Raman cleans Bass' clock in the general election. Bass' tenure of mayor has been defined by pro-developer, anti-homeless, and pro police union actions.

To Be Fair, He Could Just Be That F%$#ing Stupid

2026-06-08T19:05:00.000-04:00

We are, after all, talking about Tommy Tuberville, who has the intellectual acumen of bug-on-a-stick moss , so he could have just committed voter fraud by mistake.

One of President Donald Trump's top allies in the U.S. Senate has been busted for voting in a different state.

AL.com's Kyle Whitmire has been doggedly pursuing rumors about Sen. Tommy Tuberville's residency, voting record and, thus, his eligibility to run for Alabama governor, and the columnist has turned up evidence the Republican senator voted in Florida in 2018 – three months after moving back to the state he now represents.

"For years, Tuberville has struggled to convince everybody he was a bona fide Alabama 'resident citizen,'" Whitmire wrote. "Alabama law requires candidates for governor to have lived in the state for the last seven years. The evidence didn’t seem to be on his side."

Tuberville, for nearly two decades, owned a 4,000-square-foot beach house worth at least $4 million on Florida's Gulf Coast but purchased a much smaller home in Auburn, Alabama, in 2017 that he claimed as his primary residence while running for Senate, and he later sold that house in 2023.

"[That] three-bedroom, one-bathroom Auburn house ... has been appraised at about $300,000, less than a tenth of what the Florida beach house is worth. But this is what Tuberville said was his residence," Whitmire wrote. "As a U.S. senator, Tuberville has used campaign funds and taxpayer dollars to fly to Florida often — to dine in its restaurants and to travel by car. As much as, if not more than, he does such things in Alabama."
………

However, Florida election records tell another story.

"The tax records show that Tuberville moved to the Auburn house that August," Whitmire wrote. "But Florida election records show he and his wife, Suzanne, voted in Florida that November, three months after the income taxes say he became an Alabama resident. That’s also after the homestead exemption."

State law requires Senate candidates to live in Alabama for only a day, but gubernatorial candidates must reside there for at least seven years, and Tuberville's voting record suggests he hasn't.

"This is the Tommy Tuberville who stood on the Senate floor this year and demanded the country pass the SAVE Act, the bill to require proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote, to stop people from voting where they’re not supposed to," Whitmire wrote. "In 2018, his vote did count — only in a state where he says his taxes show he no longer lived as a 'resident citizen.'"

Theoretically, Ron DeSantis could sicc his voter police Gestapo on Tuberville, and while I would pay to see this, it won't happen.

Voter fraud only counts when the accused is not white.

The Mask Slips

2026-06-08T18:52:00.000-04:00

If when arguing about a President's ability to create or change public monuments and government buildings your lawyers have to argue that Donald Trump has the unrestricted power to tear down the Statue of Liberty, you have already lost.

A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished.

Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even if it was found to be illegal, because it was too far along and involved significant national security interests.

“When did it become a fait accompli?” Judge Patricia Millett asked. “If this were complete lawlessness by the government … it couldn’t be stopped?”

“On these theories, I think that’s right,” replied Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department attorney.

Millett, an Obama appointee, peppered Roth with questions about the extent of the Trump administration’s view of its power to “move fast and break things” without being subject to legal challenge.

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?” the judge asked.

“I think that’s right, yes,” Roth responded.

Once again, I am left staring at the fiasco with an expression on my face like that of a cow that has just stepped on its own udder.

Linkage

2026-06-08T05:29:00.000-04:00

Are Trump's critics guilty of treason? Here's what the law says. (Reason) The answer is no. The answer is the same going the other way. Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and the definition is very restrictive.
The American Missile Crisis (Contrary Research) In addition to all of the other bottlenecks, we have a shortage of ammonium perchlorate oxidizer used in all current solid fuel rocket motors.
Meet the Communist Mayor Offering 50 Cents for Trump's Capture (Current Affairs) Unfortunately, this mayor is in Spain. He's only offering 50¢ because he thinks that all Trump is worth. I think that he is overpaying.
DHS issued ‘be on the lookout’ alert for comedian Ben Palmer (Injustice Watch) Palmer created a spoof ICE tip line, and DHS is attempting punish him for this. I did Nazi see this coming.
ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence - (The Intercept) This is a feature for ICE, not a bug.
LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further) (Counter Craft) The fact that they are winning awards for their slop is a mark of how low the state of the art of art. Money quote, "If a story this poorly written can win an award, the issue isn’t AI."
Scientists uncover Feynman’s formula for finding best holiday restaurant (The Guardian) I am not surprised that Richard Feynman did this, though I do wonder if he had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek when he did so.
Why it took 65 years for L.A. to build its most important rail line (Los Angeles Times) Spoiler, it was mostly political bullsh%$

One of the old classics of YouTube:

Yes

2026-06-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

In response to the question, "Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?" the answer is, "Yes."

DOGE killed the programs fighting the flesh eating maggots, because they all are flesh eating maggots.

New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses and other warm-blooded animals, was discovered in La Pryor, Texas.
The case is the only one that has been identified in the country so far, according to the USDA, but a wider outbreak could severely impact already-suffering cattle numbers and put even more of a strain on ranchers as they spend money on treatment and prevention.
In turn, the price of beef—which has gone up roughly 75% since December 2020—could continue to rise.
The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level in 75 years, and a major screwworm outbreak would cause more calves to die, adult cattle to lose weight and limit what animals are suitable for sale, meaning fewer pounds of beef reaching the market.
Even without a major outbreak, containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions, limit border crossings or impose quarantine on certain herds, all of which would further impact the nation’s cattle numbers.
The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.
The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).
Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

If the next Democratic President does not prosecute the sh%$ out of these folks, they will have betrayed their obligations at the most basic level.

Gee, Ya Think?

2026-06-07T19:07:00.000-04:00

Following reports of massive noise, an inexhaustible demand for water, and massive pollution, polling is now showing that data centers are about as popular as hemorrhoids.

Well, I am shocked by this.

A silent war is playing out across rural America.

Residents are packing themselves into local county meetings in incredible numbers and calling on their representatives to oppose gargantuan data center projects, developments that could cause electricity prices to spike, drain water supplies, and generate copious amounts of noise.

Farmers are being hailed as heroes for rejecting millions of dollars to turn their land into data centers, while claims of the facilities bringing jobs to the area are being met with incredulity and frustration.

In short, the AI backlash has grown immensely over the past year or so — and the latest numbers put the trend in stark relief.

According to a new Heatmap poll, at least seven in ten Americans would oppose a data center being built near their home. That’s a seismic shift from last September, when a similar poll found only 42 percent of Americans were opposed.

By February, the same question resulted in just 51 percent saying they were against having a data center project near their home, indicating that the opposition grew substantially in a strikingly short period of time.

“The public has swung 49 points against data centers in just nine months, underscoring the heightened political salience of the facilities and the AI industry that they embody,” Heatmap noted in in its writeup.

Gee, why would the public object to projects that pollute their air, take their water, and throw them out of work? I have no clue.

Not Enough Bullets

2026-06-07T18:39:00.000-04:00

Go old school?DOGE and DHS tried to get the Social Security Administration to declare that 2.7 million people were dead in an attempt to harass immigrants.

Everyone involved in this should never see the sky as a free man.

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive.
The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.
Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.

Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.

………

Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security, as career officials questioned the legality of such efforts and watched DOGE officials gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive databases. In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.

I'm beginning to think that if the DOGE boy's parents had decided to drown them all at birth, (I'm looking at YOU, Mae Musk) the world would be a far better place.

Headline of the Day

2026-06-07T18:09:00.000-04:00

Obama Blasts Dems for Their Most Obama-Like Traits
—Jacobin on how the Democrats spelunker in chief should not be lecturing the party on caving

It's not surprising that he is lecturing though, it's kind of his thing.

As Democrats debate how and whether to use power if they regain control of Congress and the White House, former President Barack Obama has lambasted his party for failing to more aggressively challenge or circumvent obstructions to enacting their campaign promises.

“There’s been some unwillingness on the part of Democrats in the past to break down some of the institutional barriers for us getting stuff done, just because, well, it’s always been done that way,” he lamented to a YouTube host earlier this year.

Obama said he was frustrated during his presidency with Senate filibuster rules, which require sixty votes to pass most legislation. He suggested it was a mistake for Democrats to preserve the filibuster “when it blocks us from making government effective,” arguing that it “makes people feel like government is corrupt.”

However, amid Obama’s media tour unveiling his new $850 million presidential center, documents obtained by Zeteo and the Lever through an open records request show Obama as president scoffing at demands that he more forcefully navigate those same barriers on health care policy, when he and his party controlled the White House and large majorities in Congress.

Yeah, pretty much.

He lectures on this when there is no personal cost for him to do so.

The last 'graph of the article says it all, "Obama’s new presidential center, which will open later this month, has received at least $1 million from the health insurer Health Care Service Corporation, which is part of Blue Cross Blue Shield."

Well, Trash Belongs in Trash Bags

2026-06-06T20:35:00.000-04:00

As the backlash against Flock AI driven license plate readers grow, more and more municipalities are canceling their contracts.

They find two problems, canceling the contract is difficult because of their Byzantine nature, and even when canceled, Flock does not remove them, so the cameras remain on their poles, where anyone with a Flock contract (think ICE) can continue to use them.

Some towns have an interesting way of dealing with this, they are sending out government workers to cover the cameras with trash bags. (alternate link)

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.
Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager of Dayton, said at a city commission meeting last week that the “Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras” as a stop-gap measure until Flock cameras could be removed entirely. I spoke to multiple people in Dayton who said they had seen bagged cameras in the last few days. The Dayton Daily News first reported on the baggings.
Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city. Cities around the country have been reconsidering their relationship with the surveillance company after reporting from 404 Media and local news outlets that showed data from the cameras was making its way to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national camera network.

Flock cameras are usually solar powered, so once installed, it costs more to take them down than it does to leave them there, particularly if the data can be sold to someone else.

Garbage bags are a decent solution to this dynamic.

Gee, Imagine That

2026-06-06T20:09:00.000-04:00

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a "millionaires tax" is generating far more revenue than anticipated.

Gee, who could have seen that coming?

Billionaires tax is more like it.

The state’s surtax on its highest earners has already generated more than $3.1 billion in revenue this fiscal year, with still two months to be counted, likely leaving lawmakers with a generous surplus to dole out next spring.

The amount, disclosed in a letter released by the state Department of Revenue, already tops the $3 billion the state collected from the so-called millionaires tax during fiscal year 2025. It also far surpasses the $2.4 billion the state projected to spend from the levy in the fiscal year that ends next month.

The constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2022 applies a 4 percent surtax on annual income “in excess” of $1 million. But the measure also included a trigger linking that seven-figure threshold to any changes in the cost of living, meaning the amount someone has to earn to hit the tax increases with inflation. For tax year 2026, for example, only income over $1.1 million is now taxed.

Before the measure passed on the ballot, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, projected it could generate at least $2 billion a year.

It’s repeatedly topped that. Around this time last fiscal year, the surtax had already produced $2.6 billion in revenue. The year before, it had produced about $1.8 billion by around this time.

The estimates immediately buoyed supporters’ claims that the surtax would deliver much-needed revenue for the state despite fears it could drive some of the state’s wealthiest residents to move to locales with lower tax burdens.

Yeah, they always say that, and it doesn't really ever happen.

Yesterday Was The Monthly Jobless Report

2026-06-06T19:47:00.000-04:00

The numbers are quite good, 172K new jobs in the non-farm payroll and was unemployment unchanged at 4.3%.

What is notable is where the job growth occurred, largely leisure and hospitality and local and state government employment.

The former is driven by the World Cup being in the United States, though it increasingly looks like this will be a bit of a bust, because foreigners do not want to be subject to the tender mercies of Customs and Border Patrol or ICE.

I'm not sure were the local government pickup is coming from, though a part of it could be from former federal civil servants finding new jobs.

These numbers make a rate hike by the Federal Reserve almost certain.

I think that the analysis from the CEPR is a good summary:

Jobs are growing far faster than the breakeven rate
Wages are not keeping pace with inflation
Workers are still reluctant to leave jobs
Job-killing AI is not visible in the data
Self-employment is lagging

The last one is not at all surprising. When the social safety net is reduced, striking out on one's own as an entrepreneur becomes far more risky.

Of course, all of the above is predicated on accepting that the numbers are real, so YMMV.

Crap

2026-06-06T18:56:00.000-04:00

Slate Auto promises to put out a low cost, bare bones, and spyware free electric pickup truck, which sounds good, but then I discovered that Jeff Bezos is a major backer of the firm.

My eldest had expressed an interest in something like this, so I need to tell them not to buy this.

Ahead of its launch late this year, Jeff Bezos-backed Slate Auto is figuring out how it’s going to sell its all-electric small pickup truck, and it’s reportedly getting on board with online automotive retailer Carvana.

According to TechCrunch, Carvana was given a warrant for shares in Slate Auto last year, based on documents from the State of Delaware Division of Corporations. The move comes as the startup automaker prepares to release details such as official prices later this month, as well as the end of reservations and the beginning of preordering. Since last year, Slate Auto has offered a $50 reservation fee to be among the first in line and reported 100,000 reservations in two weeks.

(emphasis mine)

So both Bezos and Carvana. That is a truly toxic mixture.

………

The Slate Truck was announced in April 2025 as a back-to-basics EV that won’t come standard with features such as power windows or an infotainment system. Buyers, however, will be able to customize the vehicle with vinyl wraps and even an enclosed SUV body with a rear seat. By doing this, the company targets a sub-$30,000 starting price.

Yeah, pretty bare bones.

Today in Unbelievably Crappy OpSec

2026-06-06T18:48:00.000-04:00

I have done a Google reverse image search, and this image, and there are literally dozens of copies of this floating around the web.

We know the size of the boom, the size of the F-16, and the size of Palm Jumeirah precisely.

This means that the location of this shot can be determined with a big of basic map work and trigonometry to well within 10 meters.

Not a good look, unless, of course, you are a member of the IRGC.

Demanding the Right to Murder Black Men

2026-06-05T21:18:00.000-04:00

At the state convention Minnesota Republicans held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvan, who murdered George Floyd.

They are offended that white cops are not allowed to murder black men whenever they want.

The Minnesota Republican party’s decision to hold a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has angered the state’s attorney general – who was the lead prosecutor in the case.

Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said Saturday’s gesture at the state Republicans’ annual convention in Duluth was “an act of profound cruelty” to Floyd’s family and “disrespectful” to Minnesota’s law enforcement personnel.

“This decision dishonors the memory of George Floyd and wounds his loved ones all over again,” Ellison said in a statement.

Alluding to how the murder had happened six years earlier almost exactly, Ellison added: “To honor the man convicted of murdering George Floyd – days after the very anniversary of that terrible day – is an act of profound cruelty to the Floyd family and to every Minnesotan who believes in accountability under law.

These are really truly awful people.

Bummer of a Birthmark, Elon

2026-06-05T20:56:00.000-04:00

Unlike Nasdaq and a number of other stock indices, S&P will not be waiving its rules for inclusion into its S&P 500 index for the SpaceX IPO.

These requirements are:

Last quarter earnings and the sum of the last four quarterly earnings must both be positive.
Annual trade volume must meet or exceed the market cap.
12 months have passed since the initial public offering.
US-based. The company trades on a US exchange, a plurality of its assets are US-based, and the headquarters are in the US
The company must be a corporation that issues common stock. It cannot have multiple share structures.
Unadjusted market cap is at least $8.2 billion.
The IWF is at least .10.

With a $75 billion IPO on a $1.75 trillion (IWF=0.04) it means that SpaceX would not qualify for inclusion for well over a year.

The company fulfills only one of the requirements for a listing.

Considering the large number of funds that either in whole or in part invest in the S&P 500 as an index fund, this means that about $14 billion in forced purchase of the stock will not occur.

So about 20% of guaranteed demand for the IPO won't be there.

Despite an expected record-breaking IPO, SpaceX will still have to follow the rules and wait at least a year before it’s added to the S&P 500, the benchmark behind many Americans’ retirement funds

S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Thursday that it is keeping its eligibility rules intact for the S&P 500 and several other major indexes. Indexes are benchmarks that track specific slices of the stock market. The best known is the S&P 500, which tracks 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the United States.

Many index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) hold stocks that mirror these benchmarks in an effort to replicate their performance. These funds are a key part of many 401(k)s, pension funds, and retirement accounts.

………

Other index providers, including Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, have already changed their rules to allow companies like SpaceX to join some of their indexes sooner.

But the S&P 500 remains the most widely tracked equity benchmark in the world. Roughly $7.5 trillion in passively managed funds follow it, Bloomberg reports.

If SpaceX had been fast-tracked into the index, it would have resulted in about $14 billion in forced passive buying of the company’s stock, according to an estimate by Bloomberg Intelligence.

How dare they interfere with Elon Musk's God given right to commit stock fraud.

Today in Bullsh%$

2026-06-05T20:04:00.000-04:00

In response to complaints about the Paramont takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery about dodgy foreign funding, mass layoffs, and the destruction of journalism at the merged entity, chief legal officer Makan Delrahim is saying that this is all just antisemitism.

Way to minimize the credibility of any claims of antisemitism.

Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.

There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:
“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”
That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.

The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.

Way to give Nazis an excuse to Nazi.

Support Your Local Police

2026-06-05T19:50:00.000-04:00

It appears that an officer at ICE protests used the injury of a journalist to steal her bag full of photographic equipment.

At least time, he was charged.

A law enforcement officer in New Jersey was charged on Thursday with stealing the camera equipment of a photojournalist who was covering a protest outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.

The photojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.

The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.

………

A law enforcement officer in New Jersey was charged on Thursday with stealing the camera equipment of a photojournalist who was covering a protest outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.

The photojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.

The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.

………

Later that night, Ms. Katsanis and another photographer, who was on assignment for The Times, made their way to a nearby hospital using a wheelchair given to her by a medic at the scene.

From a hospital bed, she watched on her phone as the AirTag in her camera bag traveled across northern New Jersey — on the highway, then to a private residence, and then to a bar close to that home, she said.

Ms. Katsanis said her boyfriend and the other photographer went out to track the AirTag and found that it had been removed from her bag and was on the side of the road. She said that her name and contact information were still clearly written on the AirTag.

“That was a pretty clear sign to me that this was a theft and not just a law enforcement officer holding onto this bag for safekeeping,” said Ms. Katsanis, who reported the missing bag to the attorney general’s office.

This is likely far more common than is reported in the press.

A Bucket of Crabs

2026-06-05T19:09:00.000-04:00

In a bid for self preservation Pam Bondi fingered Todd Blanche as responsible for the non-release of the Epstein Files.

Even if true, Bondi is still responsible, and still could be subject to things like bar discipline, because she had to know what was going on.

Former attorney general Pam Bondi told lawmakers that Todd Blanche, the man Donald Trump has lined up to replace her, was “in charge” of the US Department of Justice’s controversial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Appearing before the House oversight and reform committee, which is investigating the late financier and convicted sex offender, Bondi also said she was “not certain of the extent” that Trump knew about the crimes of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Epstein who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, before they became public.
………
Blanche, who served as Bondi’s deputy at the justice department, was responsible for the “entire release of the Epstein files”, Bondi claimed, according to a transcript released by the committee on Thursday. Blanche was appointed as acting attorney general following Bondi’s ouster, and Trump said this week he planned to nominate him for the role permanently.

How about we disbar them both?

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

2026-06-05T18:51:00.000-04:00

We another credit union failure, the 5th (sort of) the year, Beverly Hills City Employees Federal Credit Union of Beverly Hills, California.

If this sounds familiar, that is because it is. It was conserved on 22 January, and on Tuesday it was merged with Nuvision Federal Credit Union. I'm calling it number 6 of the year, but it could be just an extensions of the 2nd closure of the year, or you could call this an additional ½ credit union closure.

Thoroughly confused now?

Anyway, here is the Full NCUA list, and the direct link for this year.

Clarence Thomas Learned Corruption from the Master

2026-06-05T18:29:00.000-04:00

In news that should surprise no one, Scalia Cheney engaged in virtually identical corrupt behavior, and engaged in a virtually identical defense of the indefensible.

In recent years, Justice Clarence Thomas’s fondness for taking luxury vacations on billionaire-owned superyachts has made Supreme Court ethics reform perhaps the single easiest campaign promise for Democratic politicians to make. But two decades ago, the real-world particulars of Supreme Court conflict-of-interest scandals were smaller in scale: for example, the physical proximity of Justice Antonin Scalia to Vice President Dick Cheney when the two men were sitting in duck blinds, shotguns in hand, waiting to kill some birds.

The saga began in January 2004, shortly after Cheney and Scalia—good friends since their time working together in the Ford administration—traveled to Louisiana for an annual duck hunt hosted by an acquaintance of Scalia’s. Cheney invited Scalia to join him on a government plane for the flight from Washington; Scalia, along with his son and son-in-law, accepted.

The objectionable part of this story (legally speaking, I mean) was that several weeks earlier, the Court had granted certiorari in a case about whether Cheney had to disclose details about clandestine meetings with fossil fuels executives while he was leading a task force responsible for the Bush administration’s energy policy. The Sierra Club had argued that Scalia, fresh off a vacation with the vice president and a free flight on Air Force Two, should recuse himself from the case, on the grounds that his impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.”

Scalia refused, however, releasing a 21-page memo in which he assured the public that he and Cheney had not discussed the case, and had never even been alone together—in duck blinds or otherwise—during the entirety of the trip. After running through a brief history of social relationships between Supreme Court justices and elected officials, from poker games to dinner parties to Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone’s early-morning medicine-ball workouts with members of the Hoover administration, Scalia asserted that a rule requiring the justices to recuse themselves from cases involving their famous friends would be “utterly disabling.”

Gee, it sounds awfully familiar.

Scalia did, as Thomas, Alito, and Roberts do, found press coverage of corruption to be the real problem.

A Feature, Not a Bug

2026-06-04T20:06:00.000-04:00

Much like when the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ used micro-targeting of its employment advertisements to exclude minorities, the news that AI algorithms reject minority job applicants at hire rates seems to me to be more of a deliberate choice than an accident.

AI algorithms exhibit racial bias in job candidate screening, and they discriminate more frequently against those applying for multiple jobs at different companies, according to Stanford-led researchers.

The boffins evaluated algorithmic hiring decisions across multiple employers that use the same hiring vendor. The resulting algorithmic monoculture, they say, is problematic.

The vendor in this instance was talent platform pymetrics, acquired by Harver in 2022. Harver did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nothing to see here, move along.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2026-06-04T19:58:00.000-04:00

Claims and planned layoffs

Labor costs and productivity

The state of the economy is ………So, he have a spike in initial unemployment claims, though continuing claims, which are actually from a week earlier, fell.

Planned layoffs remain low, though they are up a bit, and productivity rose slightly, but wages did not keep up with inflation.

Meanwhile, I get serious 2008 vibes from the fall in factory construction jobs as well as the increasing exodus of realtors from the profession.

The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits increased more than expected last week, touching their highest level in four months, but the underlying trend remained consistent with a stable labor market.

Economists shrugged off the rise in weekly jobless claims reported by the Labor Department on Thursday as volatility related to last Monday's Memorial Day holiday. Claims tend to rise around public holidays. They said there were no signs yet the Middle East conflict was having a noticeable impact on the labor market, ‌though uncertainty was growing.

………

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 225,000 for the week ended May 30, the highest level since the first week of February. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 213,000 claims for the latest week. The four-week moving average of claims, which irons out week-to-week volatility, increased only 6,500 to 214,750.

………

Layoffs remain low by historical standards, despite high-profile job cuts by technology firms related to the adoption of artificial intelligence. U.S.-based employers announced 97,006 job cuts in May, about 39% of them in the technology sector, a separate report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas showed on Thursday. That was up 16% from April.

………

Still, planned job cuts rose only 3% compared to the same period last year. Though employers have not responded with mass layoffs to rising shortages and inflation stemming from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, now in its fourth month, economists said that could change, the longer the conflict drags on.
The Labor Department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, on Tuesday showed hiring decreased and layoffs fell in April, suggesting the increase in payrolls that month was due to lower layoffs. A stable labor market allows the Federal Reserve to focus on inflation. Financial markets expect the U.S. central bank to keep its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 3.50%-3.75% range into 2027.

U.S. stocks opened lower. The dollar slipped against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury yields fell.
A third report from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics showed worker productivity growth slowed faster than initially thought in the first ⁠quarter, but the underlying trend remained strong and a boost is expected from businesses adopting artificial intelligence for many roles.
Nonfarm productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, increased at a downwardly revised 0.3% annualized rate last quarter. That was the slowest since the first quarter of 2025. Productivity was previously estimated to have risen at a 0.8% pace last quarter. Economists had expected productivity growth would be revised down to a 0.5% pace.

As to factory construction:

Yesterday, the Commerce Department released data on construction in April. It showed that factory construction is continuing to fall. In nominal terms, it dropped another 1.2 percent in April from its March level. Adjusting for inflation, the decline would be roughly 1.3 percent.

Factory construction has been on a downward path since the third quarter of 2024. It is now down by close to 27 percent from its recent peak.

As to realtors:

The slowest housing market in decades is stretching into its fourth year, and even real-estate agents who made it this far are reaching a breaking point. Most of them are independent contractors and get paid when a deal closes. With fewer sales to go around and homes taking longer to sell, more agents are ditching the industry or finding second jobs.

………

The downturn is also hitting mortgage-loan officers and the many other industries reliant on home sales, from appraisers and photographers to appliance manufacturers.

………

The National Association of Realtors had 1.4 million members as of April, down from a peak of 1.6 million in October 2022.

This seems to me to be a Wile E. Coyote moment economy.

Osama Take Me Now!

2026-06-04T19:01:00.000-04:00

So, there I am, just browsing the news, and I come across this headline:

The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It's Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry

Please, make it stop.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

2026-06-04T18:46:00.000-04:00

LMAOOO pic.twitter.com/6tHT922FK1
— VolgaLad (@cym27s) June 3, 2026

Very dark humor, but I like dark humor.

It's a Metaphor

2026-06-04T06:06:00.000-04:00

[image or embed]
— Patsy “Resistance Kitty” Evans Ph.D. (@drharmony.net) June 3, 2026 at 10:15 PM

This is unbelievably true.

This Won't Come to Much

2026-06-03T21:26:00.000-04:00

The House of Representatives has passed a War Powers Act resolution requiring that Trump get Congressional approval to continue prosecuting the war against Iran.

It has to be approved by the Senate as well, and would almost certainly require a conference committee to hash out differences, and even then Trump would veto this.

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats. The dissident Republicans were Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Tom Barrett of Michigan.

Wednesday’s vote came nearly two weeks after House Republicans cancelled an earlier scheduled vote, on the grounds that they lacked the votes to defeat it.

The vote sends the resolution to the Senate. A handful of Senate Republican defectors joined Democrats last month to advance a similar resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval after four Republican senators rebelled and voted with the Democrats.

………

The vote’s impact is largely symbolic, as it is unclear whether the House version, which is a concurrent resolution and does not need to be signed by the president, carries the force of law, even if it also passes in the Senate. But it was a striking demonstration of the nascent willingness among a segment of Republicans to defy Trump, who has kept a vise-like grip on the party on Capitol Hill, through his willingness to exact retribution against dissenters.

It embarrasses, and likely enrages, Trump, but beyond that, I do not expect anything to change.

The End of an Era

2026-06-03T20:12:00.000-04:00

The US Marine Corps has retired its final AV-8B Harriers from service.

The unmistakable howl of the AV-8B Harrier II has been a soundtrack to U.S. Marine Corps aviation for more than four decades. From the deserts of the Middle East and Afghanistan to the decks of amphibious assault ships at sea, the aircraft’s ability to take off from short runways, operate from austere forward bases, and land vertically made it one of the most distinctive combat aircraft ever to wear American markings. Before then, its predecessor, the first-generation AV-8A Harrier, had pioneered the ‘jump jet’ in U.S. service, after entering Marine Corps service in 1971.

Now, that illustrious era has come to an end.

In a ceremony today, the Marine Corps said its official farewell to the AV-8B when its final operational Harrier II squadron, Marine Attack Squadron 223 (VMA-223), known as the “Bulldogs,” marked the retirement of the aircraft at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina.

The event closes a remarkable chapter in Marine aviation history. The Harrier’s departure marks more than the retirement of an aircraft; it represents the conclusion of a concept that shaped Marine air power for generations and helped define the Corps’ expeditionary character.

It provided some unique capabilities, though these capabilities led to a high loss rate.

Still Colorado's Worst Governor

2026-06-03T19:38:00.000-04:00

Yes, it is Jared Polis again, who just vetoed a bill banning surveillance pricing, aka price gouging.

He really is a turd.

Rogue veto. Fresh from being censured by his own party for pardoning an election-denying county clerk who’d tampered with voting machines, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis again bucked fellow Democrats by vetoing a bill that would have been the strongest surveillance pricing ban in the country. Surveillance pricing is the algorithmic exploitation of consumers’ personal data to charge them the most they’re willing to pay. A majority of Americans oppose the practice, but in his veto letter, Polis claimed the Colorado bill could discourage “perfectly acceptable uses of technology to set an appropriate price or wage, or the use of technology to save consumers money through discounts.”

Polis’ term-limited administration ends in January, and one potential successor has already said he will sign a surveillance pricing bill. Gubernatorial candidate and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) told The Lever that “Nobody should be charged more for groceries during a natural disaster, for example — but that’s what happens with surveillance pricing, which allows businesses to track consumers’ and workers’ personal data and adjust prices and wages based on recent search and purchase history, location, and other data.”

What a pathetic waste of about a million years of evolution.

Speaking of Fraud

2026-06-03T19:09:00.000-04:00

Following a certification of a class action lawsuit against Tesla for misleading about, "Full Self Driving," Tesla retroactively and surreptitiously changed the terms of existing contracts.

I'm an engineer, not a lawyer dammit,* but this seems to me to be to be a deliberate attempt at spoliation of evidence, which would mean that the judge could (probably should) instruct the jury that this behavior is an indicator that the party in question was acting from a knowledge of their guilt/responsibility.

Here's hoping that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ gets his flabby white ass handed to him in court.

Tesla has retroactively modified “Full Self-Driving” purchase agreements to add “supervised” language that did not exist when owners originally bought the product. In some cases, the original documents have been made entirely inaccessible.

Electrek has confirmed the issue with multiple owners. The contracts in question were signed between 2016 and early 2024, when Tesla sold the package as “Full Self-Driving Capability” — with no mention of “supervised” and the implicit promise of unsupervised autonomy.

………
The critical detail: on both accounts, the only documents that are inaccessible are those that would reference FSD purchase details. Every other document, including purchase agreements for vehicles without FSD, opens without issue.

“It’s crazy because there are zero issues opening any documents on both accounts except those that would have the FSD purchase details documented,” Abcarius said. “Super fishy.”

Electrek has confirmed that other Tesla owners, specifically those with Tesla HW3 vehicles and FSD, have the same issue. The issue specifically affects contracts from the era when Tesla sold FSD without “supervised” language.
………
Making original purchase agreements inaccessible fits a broader pattern.

In August 2024, Tesla deleted a blog post from October 2016 that stated “all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory — including Model 3 — will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.” The post was removed without explanation while lawsuits were building. It is still accessible through the Wayback Machine.
Now, the original contracts that would show Tesla sold FSD without any “supervised” qualifier are becoming inaccessible — right as Tesla faces up to $14.5 billion in lawsuits spanning FSD false advertising, Autopilot crash liability, and securities fraud.

When will Elon be frog marched out of his offices in handcuffs?

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Of Course He Did

2026-06-03T18:13:00.000-04:00

Remember serial (and surreal) fraudster and former Congressman George Santos?

Well, he is back in the news, because he announced that he would be attending the State of the Union address and then bet that he would not be there on Kalshi, and then did not show up.

George Santos may be the latest individual caught trading on insider information in a prediction market.

According to NPR, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is examining whether the former New York congressman placed bets on Kalshi using nonpublic details about his own plans. The market in question centered on whether Santos would attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February.

In the days leading up to the State of the Union address, Santos posted a video on X stating he would appear in the event. That public confirmation pushed the odds of his attendance on Kalshi close to 75% the night before the event, drawing millions of dollars in wagers across related markets. Santos did not show up to the State of the Union address, however. During the speech he posted on X that he was watching from an airport television instead. The odds on his attendance collapsed shortly afterward.

The first thing learned (more accurately re-learned) is that George Santos is a cheap bunco artist.

The second thing learned is that this is a feature, and not a bug of the, "Prediction markets."

Bad F%$#ng Idea

2026-06-02T21:55:00.000-04:00

So, there are a number of ways that a future Democratic Party controlled Congress can deal with the issue of Gerrymandering.

This is the worst one I have seen so far, Congress refusing to seat Representatives from the states that have redistricted.

Apart from the obvious, it would cover California or any other blue state redistricting as well, it would embolden Republicans to do the same thing for any reason that they can pull out of their flabby wrinkled white asses.

………

Here’s an idea, then, for how the next Congress can defend multiracial democracy without needing to pass legislation. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution makes each House of Congress the “Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.” Meanwhile, Article IV, Section 4 says that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” This provision—known as the Guarantee Clause—has long been held to be unenforceable in court—“non-justiciable,” to use the technical term. This rule dates back to the (wild) 1849 case Luther v. Borden, in which the Supreme Court declined to get involved in the recent Rhode Island civil war.

Instead, making good on the guarantee of republican government is left largely to Congress—and not only through the use of its legislative powers. For, as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (yep, same guy) put it in Luther v. Borden, “when the senators and representatives of a State are admitted into the councils of the Union, the authority of the government under which they are appointed, as well as its republican character, is recognized by the proper constitutional authority.” In other words, Congress judges the republican character of each state every time it seats that state's elected representatives. This also implies that Congress can refuse to seat a state's representatives, if it thinks that state's government is not republican. And it has in fact used this power, most notably during Reconstruction: the Southern states' delegations were not seated until they had re-established legitimate, republican government to the satisfaction of Congress.

Suppose, then, that a majority of the House of Representatives thinks that Callais was wrongly decided. That would mean that the elections for Congress in states like Tennessee, which have eagerly exploited Callais, were conducted unlawfully, even unconstitutionally. It might even imply that the governments of those states are no longer republican in character: surely, after all, the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of black suffrage is an essential part of what republican government means in America today. Accordingly, Congress could refuse to seat any of Tennessee's nine (all-white, all-Republican) representatives.

This would be a f%$#ing disaster.

Trial Lawyers for the Win

2026-06-02T20:19:00.000-04:00

Have you heard the one about people who told the truth about bigot Charlie Kirk winning lawsuits against the employers who fired them?

Well, you have now.

Big props to Drew Pittock and BrieAnna J. Frank of USA Today for sussing out something I’d been curious about for months. You may recall that, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, and in the teeth of gale-force wing-nut keening, some people posted some of Kirk’s own words as a kind of corrective. Some other people posted admittedly tasteless reactions as well. Fearing the vengeance of the cult, major institutions, including government agencies and universities, fired these social-media miscreants. Many of those people turned around and sued the institutions in question. And, with discussion of reparation payments all the rage these days, it’s fit that we point out that some of the victims of cowardice and mob rule are cashing out in a big way.

Settlements totaling more than $1.5 million have been reached so far with people who lost their jobs over social media posts that were critical of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

The free-speech cases in Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana highlight a growing debate surrounding the First Amendment, political discourse and social media. It’s “not surprising to see this flurry of settlements,” Aaron Terr, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s director of public advocacy, told USA Today. “I think the size and frequency of these settlements shows that violating the First Amendment is expensive.” ... USA Today reported a little more than two weeks after Kirk was killed, at least 50 people had lost their jobs in the education sector alone. A Reuters investigation also found that 600 people were fired across the private sector for posts they shared about Kirk.

Vice President J Divan Vance, who has demonstrated the democratic soul of an ambitious Stasi recruit, led the mob. He told people to inform on their colleagues who did not memorialize the deceased at a proper volume. Now that everything’s calmed down, the bill is coming due for what happened to people like a Tennessee cop named Larry Bushart.

Mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Of Course They Will

2026-06-02T19:39:00.000-04:00

Trump has chickened out over the slush fund, but the order giving Trump and his family a free pass on tax fraud will remain.

I'm wondering if this was the real goal all along.

The Justice Department is standing by an extraordinary measure giving President Trump, his family and his businesses potentially lucrative protection from I.R.S. investigations, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Blanche’s remarks about the tax protections came during an appearance in front of a House Appropriations subcommittee, in which he told lawmakers that the Trump administration was abandoning a related plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to pay restitution to people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization.”

Mr. Blanche said the end of the fund would not affect the separate agreement shielding Mr. Trump from audits of tax returns he and his family had already filed. Both proposals had emerged in recent weeks as part of a settlement of Mr. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. But now only the measure benefiting the Trumps will survive, Mr. Blanche said.

“Nothing has changed with that,” he said, referring to the tax proposal. “We’re not moving forward with the anti-weaponization fund.”

Mr. Blanche’s directive left in place a staggering public benefit to a president who has sought to bend the government toward his own financial interests. A host of thorny legal questions also remain. Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. was revived last week by a judge concerned about potential deception in the agreement to withdraw the suit and to release the Trumps from any ongoing audits.

These protections could be immensely valuable to Mr. Trump and his family, who have faced repeated audits from the Internal Revenue Service. Just one investigation by the I.R.S. stemmed in part from how Mr. Trump claimed losses on his Chicago tower could have cost him more than $100 million, The New York Times has reported. The Trump Organization had recently entered settlement talks with the I.R.S. to try to resolve the audit, The Times previously reported.

Tax lawyers and former I.R.S. officials have said that the protection for Mr. Trump was unprecedented in its scope and form, particularly since it extends to “affiliates” of the Trumps. Pre-existing I.R.S. procedure has been to audit the president every year, rather than confer on him sweeping protection from scrutiny on tax returns already filed.

Meatloaf for Dinner Again?

2026-06-02T19:03:00.000-04:00

New rules from the Department of Agriculture will drastically increase the speed of lines in slaughter houses, which will results in more worker injuries, particularly repetitive stress injuries, and increase contamination, likely including a human finger or two.

Welcome to a reboot of Upton Sinclaire's The Jungle.

The country’s poultry and swine processing plants, already incredibly dangerous workplaces, are poised to get a green light from the Trump administration to vastly speed up the work. In February, the Agriculture Department released two proposed regulations to increase evisceration line speeds for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The swine plant proposal removes the current maximum of 1,106 hogs an hour and instead imposes no limit at all, allowing companies “to determine their own line speeds,” which has never happened before. The proposed poultry rule, meanwhile, allows all chicken plants to run at 175 birds per minute, a limit that has only applied previously to plants involved in a pilot program. Turkey processing plants could increase from 55 to 60 birds per minute.

The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers; it also threatens to let more foodborne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.

The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds.

Headline of the Day

2026-06-02T18:39:00.000-04:00

‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library
—The Guardian, on the architecture of the Obama library

Over 7 years ago, I said that his library would, "Rip the heart out of one of Fredrick Law Olmstead's most significant works."

I stand by this assessment. See the world's ugliest menhir:

He Deserves This Bad Week

2026-06-01T21:06:00.000-04:00

US district judge Christopher Cooper has ruled that Donald Trump's name must come down from the Kennedy Center. He has also ruled that Trump's 2-year shutdown to remake the building into a gold plated grotesque will not go forward.

A judge on Friday ordered the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ruling that the prestigious Washington DC venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress.

US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington directed the Trump administration to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and to eliminate any references to a “Trump Kennedy Center” from official materials within 14 days.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

The judge added: “The Court has concluded that the Board overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump.”
Not long after the ruling, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would work with Congress on transferring ownership of the Kennedy Center.

“I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management,” he wrote.

Ummm....wut? Transfer? You do not own the Kennedy Center. Neither does Congress.

The American people own it.

Cooper also temporarily blocked the center from closing this summer for proposed renovations, two months after Trump announced its two-year closure.

He said that “in ratifying President Trump’s closure announcement, the Board was derelict in discharging the full range of its responsibilities to the Center”.

………

The lawsuit was brought by Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democratic US representative and a member of the Kennedy Center’s board by virtue of her position in Congress.

Thank you Representative Beatty.

It Was as True . . . As Turnips Is. It Was as True . . . As Taxes Is. And Nothing’s Truer than Them

2026-06-01T20:15:00.000-04:00

Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead.

[image or embed]
— George Wallace (@mrgeorgewallace.bsky.social) June 1, 2026 at 4:10 PM

Great wisdom.

He truly is a truly horrible human being.

Good Move

2026-06-01T19:02:00.000-04:00

The NAACP has called for college athletes to boycott schools in states that have engaged in racist mid-decade redistricting.

If this works, it's a good thing.

The NAACP on Tuesday launched a campaign urging Black athletes, their families, alumni and fans to boycott athletic programs of public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation”.

In the announcement of the “Out of Bounds” campaign, the civil rights giant name-checked eight states – Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Georgia – whose flagship public athletic programs generate more than $100m in annual revenue. Each of those states has moved to draw new maps to limit Black voting representation, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act.

“What these states have done is not a policy disagreement. It is a sprint to erase Black political power,” Derrick Johnson, president & CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums and their bank accounts remain silent while their states strip Black communities of their voice.”

The campaign calls on football and basketball players who are currently being actively recruited by targeted programs to withhold their commitments until the states “restore fair congressional maps and meaningful Black representation”, to ask coaches and athletic directors at targeted programs where their universities stand on voting rights and to visit and seriously consider committing to athletic programs at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

It might work. College sports is something sacrosanct in these states.

………
The assault comes from the country’s highest judicial office, where the supreme court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 under the argument that protecting the voting opportunities of Black people is a discriminatory practice and not a restorative one, despite the hundreds of graves throughout the south, marked and unmarked, of Black Americans killed for trying to vote.

………

This week, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) turned to sports to join part of its dissent, calling for Black athletes to boycott public universities in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), arguably the most powerful football conference in the country and certainly its greatest incubator of Black athletic talent. The NAACP is responding to a political attack with a social and economic one, for no institution is as culturally relevant in the south as college football, and few economic engines gain as much public attention as sports.

Here's hoping that this causes enough pain to create a political backlash against the racist dirt-bags.

Colorado's Worst Governor

2026-06-01T18:18:00.000-04:00

Jared Polis, once again showing how he is a Republican in drag.

This time, he vetoed the repeal of Colorado's anti-union right-to-work law.

This is in addition to his commuting Tina Peters sentence for election fraud.

For the second time, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have eliminated a unique second election requirement in the state’s union formation law, after business and labor groups failed to reach a compromise on how to tweak the measure.

“In the wake of (last year’s) veto and the substantial negotiations that preceded it, I would have hoped that both business and labor leaders could have worked to craft a long-term and durable agreement on this matter that would have served Colorado workers and businesses alike,” Polis wrote in his veto letter on Friday. “Unfortunately, because that did not happen, this issue will likely come up again next year and every subsequent year until it is addressed, which creates uncertainty for both workers and businesses.”

House Bill 25-1005 would have repealed the Labor Peace Act in Colorado. Unions can form with a simple majority, per federal law, but in Colorado they must win a second election with 75% of the vote to negotiate so-called union security — whether all workers need to pay into collective bargaining negotiations.

His political career needs to be ended.

It's Taco Monday!

2026-06-01T18:04:00.000-04:00

I do not mean the snack involving fillings held in a tortilla, rather, I am referring to the acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out, and in this case, Donald Trump has put a hold on his $1.776 billion "Lawfare" fund.

It appears that even his most sycophantic allies in Congress felt that this was a bridge too far.

The Trump administration plans to drop its controversial $1.8 billion "weaponization" fund the president sought to compensate alleged victims of prosecutorial misconduct under the Biden administration, two senior administration officials told Axios.

Why it matters: Bashed as a political slush fund that could be tapped by those convicted in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump's proposal has drawn bipartisan pushback in the GOP-led House and Senate.

Also, a Federal judge has opened an inquiry as to whether Trump and the DoJ perpetrated a fraud on the court, (it clearly is) which has the potential for major sanctions.

A federal judge ordered President Trump to respond to "grievous" accusations that his settlement with the IRS, which led to the creation of his anti-weaponization fund, was "premised on deception."

Why it matters: The order comes the same day a separate judge placed a temporary hold on the $1.776 billion pot of money, another potential hurdle to the administration's controversial settlement plan.
Driving the news: U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams' order followed a earlier motion from 35 former federal judges, who implored her to reopen the case brought in January over the leak of Trump's tax returns.
The coalition of judges alleged in their Wednesday filing that the settlement "raises profound questions about the parties' candor toward the Court and manipulation of the judicial system."
Williams ordered the plaintiffs to respond by June 12 to the allegations of collusion, the assertion the dismissal was "premised on deception by the Parties," and the question of whether the case should be reopened.

It appears that Trump has finally done something so transparently corrupt that even Republican members of Congress are balking.

Linkage

2026-06-01T05:46:00.000-04:00

Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: "I'm Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI" (Futurism) Ronny Chieng from The Daily Show.
Dev Says He's Getting Threats After Leaving a Booby Trap for Vibe Coders A(Gizmodo) I'd call this a good start.
I Translated Völsa Þáttr for You (J.G. Harker) a 14th century story which may provide information on ancient Norse pagan practices.
Tesla Insiders Admit Self-Driving Is a Complete Disaster (Futurism) You do not need to be an insider to know this.
Woman With No Right Hand Is Pulled Over for Using Phone in Her Right Hand (New York Times) Ticket quotas don't fulfill themselves.
Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it (The Register) Optimizing the queries.
Stablecoins Are Private Money. That’s Why They’re a Risk to the Economy (Wall Street Journal) Also, it's a numbers racket.
More Fed policymakers eye possible rate hike as inflation risks rise (Reuters) Yeah, that new Fed Chair is not going to do what Trump wants.

From the department of too much free time: